


The Unconquered Territory

by alephthirteen



Category: Dracula (TV 2013), Frontier (TV 2016), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alpha Kara, Alpha Lena, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Bear attacks, Demoness Sam, Elder Vampire Lena, F/F, F/M, Fire and Brimstone Preacher Max Lord, Frontier AU, Gunslinger Alex, Hand-Carved Hardwood Dildos, Lena Taken on a Bed of Furs, M/M, Nesting Kara, Our Girls Kill, Our Girls are Dark, Our Girls are Fireside Tales and Stories to Make Children Behave, Pack Dynamics, Pine Forests, Scenery of the Yukon, Seer Nia, Sexy Widow Lena, Sketchy Frontiermen, Smelly Men, Timberwolves - Freeform, Trading Post Cat, Two-Spirit Nia, Vampire Coven - Freeform, Werewolf Pack, Wolves in the Wild Behave Differently, Woods Witch Mercy, Worn-down Whores, redwoods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26615536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: Lena Luthor has killed before.  Part and parcel, after all.  Husbands get curious.  They look for old portraits.  They look for countesses and traveling opera singers with the name 'Lena'.  They write her into their will, without fail.  Compulsion is hardly needed when a corset will ruin a man's brain faster than a bullet.  She's had Jack since the old days.  Since Istanbul and Toledo and Orleans.  Endless moonlight waltzes, days spent hiding in mosques and nunneries.The new world.  Change of scene.  Jack's right.-----Kara's wolf bursts forth with a howl, in cracking bones and sprouting hair.  She drops into a hunting crouch the moment the scent hits her nose.  Slick.  Soft.  Fertile.  Mouthwatering as raw meat on the ice.  Her betas whine behind her, begging to be mounted.  Later.  There is an alpha in that house on the hill.  Hers.-----Morgan Edge's notch is a little deeper than the last dozen.  Cat greets her, like always, with bourbon and a kiss and a complaint she smells like gunpowder and horse.  She lays a pair of Colt Lightnings on the bar.  Fresh oiled.  Holsters of Italian leather."For you, Alex. My love."
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Cat Grant, Kara Danvers & Nia Nal, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Lena Luthor & Jack Spheer, Lena Luthor & Original Female Character(s), Samantha "Sam" Arias/Lena Luthor
Comments: 18
Kudos: 98





	1. Veils and Masks

**Author's Note:**

> Technology will be anachronistic (guns and tools) and some native tribes will be made up for the purposes of our tale.  
> \-----  
> Rather than risk cultural appropriation, I made up a new native tribe for Nia.  
> \-----  
> Werewolves in this universe are like ordinary wolves. European were are aggressive, dangerous and quick-tempered since they have been hunted to near-extinction like their wolf cousins. North American weres, especially in remote areas or in contact with native tribes who have spiritual linkages to them, have less fear of humans, more curiosity, and generally more chill because they have space to play and ample wild food which keeps them out of competition for livestock meat (this is why humans and wolves don't get along, sheep).

**Lena "Bryne" Luthor - London**

The carriage is clean enough but the streets in this part of town are rough. The sovereigns stuffed into her corset would bring every cutthroat and raper in London, if only they knew they were there. The notes from the Bank of England? Well, those could start a war. Jack slung the trunk of gold over his shoulder easy as a blanket. Now though, his swarthy, warm, _familiar_ skin is sallow and the soft whiskers of his half-gray beard are wan and coarse-looking.

"Do you loathe me, Jack?"

"For making me come out in the day?" he groans. "No. Some business only to be done in the day, of course."

"Not that. For taking you away."

Jack sighs.

"What was left for me in Dehli? The rubble of my family's home? Staring at the spot where my wife was butchered? Where my daughter was raped by the English until her blood stained the dirt? Nothing left there."

"You don't owe me, Jack. I free you as your maker."

"You have," he laughs, weakly.

_I must get him out of the sun._

"Three hundred and four times. No, I owe you everything. My revenge on those monsters. My life, strange as it is. These travels," he laughs, gesturing at the sooty, wicked bricks of London. "Your cold kiss on a cold night. Jess' cursing when I burn the chicken."

Her newest, "Jess" is a lean, quick oriental with keen eyes and skill at the sword that made many of the emporer's soldiers light of purse and short his head when she was nothing but a little girl with a long knife. Mandarin is no easy language but with small, tender hands guiding hers over the parchment and the smell of oolong and oranges in her lungs Lena would spend an eternity learning to write it. They have eternity, of course. Jess thinks perhaps someone can finally master Go now that forever is open.

She cannot have Jess, though Jess has been known to share the stolen concubines from the palace. Her body is warm, blazing warm, even after her turning. She has no talisman, just as Jack does but her body takes the sun as gleefully and eagerly as a bonfire.

Curious. Perhaps it's no different than how the dragons skulking Irish hillsides of her human childhood bear no resemblance to the wise, deep-voiced creatures of China. Perhaps magic is always of the land it is born in. Like the beasts who roam the land.

A witch could tell her, if any were left unburned. A handful of sorcercesses survive, having secured their safety with the bones of armies thrown against them, broken like waves on the rock. They endure with moon blood and ancient magic black as ink. They wield storms and earthquakes and chaos that shakes the earth through the bones of its mountains. Three hide in Switzerland. A dozen perhaps in the Slavic lands. It makes Lena's hairs prick any time she stands in the Alps or the Cacaus mountains.

She has no payment and it would be less foolish to ask a volcano or a mad god for free advice. The talisman is enough. Comely virgins are not easy to come by. They haven't been abundant since man lit his first fire. Lovely women, yes. Virgins? Not for long...that's the point of good looks after all. Lena would ravish half the sorceress's pay on the ride at any rate.

"Whoa, there!"

The carriage rocks to a stop, making Jack shiver and choke down nausea. Horses canter and their shoes clack on the stones. 

The door opens.

"We've arrived, miss."

The holding house looms above her. Great fortress of marble stuffed with contracts that butcher tribes, rape virgin wildernesses across the globe and set men and ships and cannon scurrying to collect the goods.

"My footman is not well and I would do him kindness and have someone else carried this," she tells the coachmen, pressing five-pound notes into his hand. "be a good lad and find me four carriers."

"That's a great deal of gold miss, to trust others with."

"I'm not."

She raps her knuckles on the hidden compartment where the coffins lie and with a raspy slide of jade on jade, Jess wakes. She steps into the sunlight, her brown eyes flicking from pigeon to newsboy to doorman before she's satisfied.

Lena hears the swish of her sword clicking back into its scabbard.

"My bodyguard," Lena explains. "Is second to none."

"Boy!" she calls out. "How much for an apple?"

"Sixty pence, m'lady."

Lena grins. Children never mind the fangs. They like to smile.

"Three, please. This one, this one, and this one."

"Yes'm."

"Jess!" Lena calls out, tossing the fattest, reddest apple.

Her blade flicks out and slices it up and down before it crosses to where he stands next to her and the flat of her blade catches the rest. She hands one of the quarter-slices to the coachman.

"Marvelous. I'll...I'll see to it, miss."

Lena sinks her teeth into her own. Seared meat might taste better but the pleasure of biting an apple, imagining it's a victim's warm breast, shaking with her excitement? She may never enter a church again but that...that act is to touch the face of God.

It's not long before four freckled, ginger lads shoulder the crate on their wide backs. A shiver of her still heart calls her mind to Derry, sweaty red curls and heaving, hot flesh and her dead lover.

"Proper Irish lads. Could carry the building, I suspect."

She lowers her mourner's veil and mounts the steps.

The old world lies at her feet, afraid and pleading. No king would deny her his wife on his wedding night, not when she arrives cloaked in smoke and moonlight with fangs flashing in the moonlight, long as silver-plated stilettos. The church gave up. Priests cost money, Knights Templar cost more and no one misses a few troublemaking nuns with randy reputations. 

Witchburners worth their salt died out in combat with sorceresses. Men of bone and blood dueling transcendent beings of made of stardust and diamond with death and life clutched in their fists.

Mortals intruding beyond their bounds.

Centuries pile on and bedmates with them. She's drained her share but she's turned more than that. Europe is hers in all but law. Arabia is swarming with dark-haired, golden-skinned murderesses born of her fangs and a night in her bed.

Nocturnal nations have been sired in bloody beds and tutored with their fangs in her breasts.

Thankfully, there is a new world to conquer.

\-----

"Forgive me, miss. I'm not sure I follow."

The clerk before her shivers in his chair.

"I wish to buy the North West Company. It is not a complicated idea."

"You are _not_ Josephine Radisson, miss. Unless I am mistaken."

"True. I am Lena Bryne but as your firm already knows, the Hudson's Bay Company was left to me, not the wife. The privilege of actually holding his heart."

"Most unusual but yes, so it seems. Why purchase another fur company? If you don't mi-"

"I rather do mind, actually. But as you are a gentleman, I will answer. There's a widow out for my blood though she has no claim, her jewelry box would suffice to hire an army of assassins. So time is of the essence. I've seen my love buried and he won't be traveling with me. I will run the business locally from the Territories so I may respond quickly rather than wait for mail and ships going back and forth. There's talk of war between the workers of Hudson's Bay and North West and I'd rather they be cooperating not competing. Joining the companies accomplishes that. Does this satisfy you?"

He gives a thin, well-practiced smile.

"Businessman's answer, if you don't mind my saying."

"Besides that, I aim to catch a ship to Dublin and on to Halifax. It leaves at dawn tomorrow and I would have this wrapped up and word sent ahead. The gold next to your desk will more than suffice for expenses and the offerings I am giving you in Punjab, Kashmir and Congo and the protection of the Barbar pirates will more than suffice for the cost of the rights to a few beaver pelts."

"That gold can put the owners in wine, fine food, and fancy whores until their dying days."

"I...I see. Rather charmingly frank, aren't you?"

"I'm no lady. Nor am I a whore. Somewhere between. Simply a woman, I suppose. Women like myself trade in our charm, warm comfort, and good cheer. Not falsely virginal swooning over our husband and meek wifely ceremony."

"Ah," he coughs. "Quite. Yes, these deeds seem positively princely. The owners will agree, I'm sure. To turn a phrase, they're taking your pelt with this arrangement."

Lena smiles slightly. Well practiced and long honed. He will see no fang in it.

"The new world is an adventure, so I hear. I feel it's time for one."

"Quite," he says with a smile.

They needn't know of the compelled men who signed those contracts and died of bite-sickness a month after. 

They needn't know of the tribe of demons in those Indian hills or what it cost Lena to have them bred by that mad Kashmiri sorceress. By the time every white-faced man with the smell of spice on him is slaughtered, she will be a world away and the deal is legally binding. The shifters in the Congo took one sniff of her and offered her wives and jewels for the chance to feast on the flesh of their tormentors.

"They would cover the expenses. Handsomely."

Lena offers her black-gloved hand.

"Splendid. Fetch a barrister for a witness and I'll spare you more of my frankness."

This time, his smile is broad and real.

If only hers could be.

\-----

**Lena "Bryne" Luthor - Northern Coast of Ireland, Shores of Lough Foyle, County Derry**

Dawn cannot come. She forbids it. Not yet. Not when she's an hour's ride from the cairn she buried Lorelai in. She spurs the ash-gray charger with a sharp rap of the heels and a snap of the reins.

"Yah!"

Frothing and jerking his head, the stallion bellows at the treatment. His sides are sweating and his breathing shallow. Too shallow.

_If I must, then._

"Would you had been fresh when I stole you, beast."

She bares her fangs and plunges them into the beast's neck. Coppery and hot and _tasteless_ blood pours down her throat, great rivers of it. A few stumbling hoofbeats later the beast collapses under her, spilling her saddlebag. 

Ripping a tuft of clover into her palm, she bites her wrist. It's not as easy as it was. Centuries have hardened her. Gravestones are softer, she has learned tonight cracking the tomb her beloved bones _should have been in_ with mad fury. Jack fled her. Jess took three paces back.

Blood black as night and thick as molten iron pours into her had, staining every leaf.

As great heaving breaths stall and falter in the lungs, she holds her palm with the bloody offering. The beast's lips stretch out and finding the clover pleasant, take the blood in the bargain.

" _Éirigh,_ " she commands. ("rise", Irish)

The coat drained of all the color and the flanks flexing with newfound strength, the stallion rears above her, now bone white with eyes of violet that say too much, too much for a mere animal.

"Shh, shh, shh. You're not tired anymore, are you?" she jokes.

Nickering and tossing his head, he finally accepts her hands and she presses her head to his.

 _"Ceangailte tá tú. Grá agat. Fuil mo chuid fola."_ ("Bound you are. Loved you are. Blood of my blood.")

She unbuckles the soldier's saddle -- it stinks of Englishman and violent ends, two scents that belong together -- removes every bit of reigns and tack and bit, returning the creature to its natural state. In his panic, he already cracked and shed the iron shoes. She shoulders her bag and mounts with a leap. The blood coursing in the horse's veins now is ages older than the blood of Christ and his lungs will never tire.

With a hand on his neck and one in his mane, they move like twin bolts lightning winding together.

She makes her goal in ten more minutes.

\-----

Granite slab flung aside and boulders rolled down the hill, she drops into the dark.

The tonic the witch gave her was good. Her lover's flesh is soil that had once been worms that had once been flies. Her bones though, those shine like diamonds. Her hair is glossy and glimmering, like silk spun of ruby stones.

Unfurling the incarnation the countess gave her in Venice, she tenderly lowers the jaw. She ripped a dangerous gash -- even for her -- in her bicep for this.

"As if a kiss," she murmurs, dribbling blood onto teeth that had once worn red lips and pressing them to her lips.

"As if a caress," she whispers, tracing the symbol on the bare bone of the forehead.

"As if a passion," she adds, taking blood smeared fingers and sliding them between pelvic bones that once held hot, trembling paradise.

"I call you, flesh gone and love irreplaceable."

Lorelai rises from between the bones. Violet and smoky, her shape nothing more than thought and Lena's memory.

"You visited again."

The dead don't mince words or deal in niceties.

"Remember that night with me, love? One last time?" Lena pleads.

> _'What trouble this time? Tell me, love.'_
> 
> _'King thinks he can sire pups like other men piss. We have to leave.'_
> 
> _'These crops feed my babe. Your son, had you forgotten? We can leave when they're bread in our bellies and milk in my breast. Not before.'_
> 
> _'Lena!'_

Just the memory of that pained, final shriek brings icy tears to her dead cheeks.

The king swatted her back like she was a fly, cracking her jaw and her hip against the rock she struck in her fall. She could still speak, however.

> _'My king, I curse you. Go back to your wives and set them free with a kind knife or you will hear their screams.'_
> 
> _'I'll have your throat in my teeth before the new moon. This I swear on Morrigan, on Danu, on Brigid, on Badb, on the sidhe of winter and summer. On the graves of Queen Medb and of Cu Cullain himself I swear.'_
> 
> _'I will butcher every son your balls ever squirted into some poor creature and I will make your daughters a pack of bloodthirsty shades to torture your nation for all eternity.'_

She dragged herself to the nearest fairy hill and with her last breath, begged an audience with Maeve of the Winter Court.

"I need your bones, Lorelai. There's magic in love. In bones. Enough protect me and my line. I would not dare to ask but I am going traveling and I may never see your grave again."

Spectral hands clasp hers. Lorelai's laugh is as sweet as ever.

"What use have I for my bones, my sweet? They've had enough rain and sea spray for my tastes. Breathe deep, breathe me into your body. Let me live forever, happy...here."

She pushes her thumb to the spot between Lena's breasts.

"A bargain struck?" Lorelai asks.

"A bargain struck."

With one great gulp, Lorelai's smoky shape passes into her throat and her heart twitches and quickens. 

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

**_I have no flesh to give you, Lena sweet. Let my love be your heartbeat._ **

Lorelai's presence is gone in the howling wind. Only memory and new heat in her one-cold flesh.

Weeping blood-tainted tears into the dirt, Lena sets to work.

\-----

There were two sisters came walkin' down the stream  
Oh the wind and rain  
The one behind pushed the other one in  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
Johnny gave the youngest a gay gold ring  
Oh the wind and rain  
Didn't give the oldest one anything  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
They pushed her into the river to drown  
Oh the wind and rain  
And watched her as she floated down  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
Floated 'till she came to a miller's pond  
Oh the wind and rain  
Mama oh father there swims a swan  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain

The miller pushed her out with a fishing hook  
Oh the wind and rain  
Drew that fair maid from the brook  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
He left her on the banks to dry  
Cryin' oh the wind and rain  
And a fiddlin' fool come passing by  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
Out of the woods came a fiddler fair  
Oh the wind and rain  
Took thirty strands of her long yellow hair  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
And he made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair  
Oh the wind and rain  
He made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones  
Oh the wind and rain  
He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
And he made a little fiddle of her breast bone  
Oh the wind and rain  
The sound could melt a heart of stone  
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain  
  
And the only tune that the fiddle would play  
Was oh the wind and rain  
The only tune that the fiddle would play  
Was oh the dreadful wind and rain

\-----

She goes beyond what the song and the sorceress command.

Lena makes a flute of the leg bones and a panpipe and small lyre of ribs, all strung with ruby hair. Where she needs fittings, she bends the gold between her fingers.

The dreadful deed is done. Tear-stained and exhausted, she clambers out of the pit.

Jack said he can play the fiddle. Something about a handsome rake in Rome. 

She has a long sea voyage to learn.

In the dawn as her flesh smokes in the first and most painful rays, playing Lorelai's favorite reel makes her feel light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jess' blade is a _dadao_ sometimes called "the Chinese greatsword" a long, slightly curved, broad-bladed sword (roughly one meter long) well suited to chopping and meant for one or two-handed use. She also carries a pair of short _jian_ blades which are straight, narrow blades that she uses for close in fighting.  
> \-----  
> The Hudson's Bay Company (est. 1670) and the North West Company (est. 1787) were massive fur trading companies in early 19th century Canada, so much so they actually fought a war in 1816. The wife mentioned is the wife of the son of the founder of Hudson's Bay, Pierre-Esprit Radisson. She's made up but it gives a logical competitor for Lena's claim in the will. The two companies both existing places our story in or around 1800. I will attempt to keep my historical errors technological, not geopolitical.  
> \-----  
> Chronologically, this story happens in whatever time period lets Lena dress in sexy corset numbers and long, wind-swept nightgowns.


	2. Soft-Wet-Warm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara runs with her pack, Lois Lane arranges a **very** strange interview, she-flesh is to be given, not stolen, and a bargain is not met.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wolves have some way of communicating to each other in wolf form here. They probably haven't had much use for complex spoken language because they just understand each other the natives they interact with have rituals to communicate their needs so their vocab is small at this point. ::handwave::  
> \-----  
> Kara's pack has been living in the deep wood, well away from any humans except natives who enter their domain for religious rites so they lack understanding of new things like horses, rifles, and white men in general. Native people are familiar, something they remember from ages past. The colonists are not.  
> \-----  
> PACK VOCABULARY:  
> Pale men-shapes = white people (British or French)  
> Men-shape or men-shapes = people  
> Wolf-shape = a wolf (like wild wolves)  
> Bare-shape = a man or a woman (furless human form)  
> Fight-shape = a hybrid shape with massive shoulders and haunches, some with tails and some without and averaging close to ten feet (the classic "werewolf" form)

**Kara - Yukon Wilderness**

The pack follows behind her, in wolf-shape, huffing and panting into the icy sting of the air. The pups are denned up with her mother, Alura, who lets them play at nursing her though she is long past bearing pups. The little male -- Winn -- tips his head back and howls and the female who prefers him -- Lyra, still their newest -- jostles him with a poke of the snout. Omegas. She thinks they can breed clever pups.Turning to face them, Kara hackles and paces.

"New flesh. Gift. Pale men-shapes. Fear us. Smell bad. Not like our men-shapes. Not like the right-smelling ones."

She noses Winn's shoulder.

"Gift. We _behave,"_ she growls.

He offers his throat so fast he doesn't expect Lyra pouncing on him until it's too late and her little tongue is dancing all around his ears and his head is pinned in her paws like the end of an elk bone she is savoring.

"Young," Kara huffs.

Her den-male Clark is her mother's sister's only pup. He's not as clever as Kara but he's big. Good choice for male alpha. He huffs his agreement and they set off together. The pine smoke, reeking of far too much wood and far too wet, like the whole forest was burning. That is the signal.

The clearing is small, formed by the meeting of two of their mud roads which reek of the shit of the big new animals they can't catch and the piss of pale men.

"Shift," she growls at Clark. "Fight-shape. Pale men smell wrong."

He bows his snout and complies with barely a whimper. His front paws fatten and split, claws long and sharp and the black ruff of fur on the top of his head wraps around, making long man-shape hair behind his ears.

She shifts herself, raising her head to the moon and relishing each crack of bone and each stretch of skin. Her coat is the color of sand and rabbit-fur. Whether in bare-shape or fight-shape it is long and fluffy. It spills down past her tail which she wishes quickly to prevent a painful tangle.

Clark bends one of the pine's branches apart and they enter the clearing together.

"Christ almighty!" one of the pale-men yelps.

_Scared. Good._

"You hurt pack," Kara huffs, flicking her injured ear.

"Would take blood. Take new flesh instead. Bargain," she reminds him.

Kara scents the air around the wood-box they used and catches a scent. Female. Woman-shape scent. Strong but frightened. Her alpha prowls.

_Protect._

_Shelter._

_Groom._

_Feed._

_Breed._

"Y-y-yes. Nice and ripe. Like the injuns said to."

"Show," Kara commands. 

The big man shrugs. The small man with the metal branch shivers. He is smaller and smells weak. He should obey.

_Do they honor, like Winn honors me?_

The other one, the pup, raises his metal branch. Kara lunges, lifting his arm so it cannot sting and plunging her teeth in this throat.

_They don't honor. Not like our man-shapes do._

"Broke bargain. Fight when no need. Take blood," she growls.

He smells of piss. More so at least.

She closes her jaws and pulls, tasting blood and skin and feeling hot wet on her muzzle. She drops the mess of flesh into the mud. He is not good enough to eat. Only good enough to kill for her pack.

"Show," Kara growls again.

The last man-shape opens the wagon. Two woman-shapes inside, both black-haired and pink-skinned. One of them afraid and one of them...

Kara sniffs.

_Not afraid. Curious._

"What called?"

The pale man-shape language feels wrong. It hurts her tongue.

"Lois Lane."

"Alpha?" Kara asks, nudging the woman's pulse with her snout.

"I can't understand you," she whimpers. "I mean, I don't know that that means."

"Means in charge. Alpha," she explains, patting her chest. "Clark is not mate. He is my...helping...alpha.

"I like to think so," she replies. She makes a strange, small, chirping sound. Like happy pups. "Came here for the San Francisco Chronicle. Writing about bribes. Think it's why these apes grabbed me. "

Kara turns to the flesh-bringer.

"Take without asking?"

He nods.

"Both?"

He nods again.

"Clark," she snarls. "Punish."

Clark whines.

Clark disobeys.

He _never_ disobeys her.

Kara turns to look and sees him nuzzling and sniffing curiously over the Lois Lane, learning her scent and the feel of her hands. Licking at her neck, on the spot where mate-bites belong. She is brave, a small woman shape offering her soft hands to his snout and his tongue.

"You are a very strange wolfie," she says.

He even lets her drag her flat-claws across his head. Clark rumbles happily and Lois laughs.

_He never mates. Makes him too easy._

Kara huffs.

"Supposed to take willing, not steal. Run or I take leg," she tells the man. "Maybe eye."

When he is gone, Kara lowers herself over the other female.

"Not hurt. Smell good."

"T-t-thanks. S-s-Siobahn."

"Sounds. Feels nice in ears."

She is long-legged and long-armed. Good hunting shape. She would be a good beta. Still young. If Kara makes her a wolf, she can hunt and breed pups and lie in the den with them for all the moons, all the winters.

"Ah. Good. Listen. I'm not sure what I did to piss Cat off but I'm not that ki-"

Kara noses under the fluffy thing around the woman's legs. She smells flesh. Tasty. 

_Make her slick!_

_Make her hold still!_

_Make her want!_

_Mount!_

Kara finds the soft-wet-warm, the place where female bare-shapes are slick -- she forgets what pale men call it -- and slides her tongue in.

"-kind of whore," Siobahn gasps. "Mmm. That's...ah...new."

"Is she?" Lois asks.

Siobahn curls too early and slick pours onto her tongue. Kara has to pin her legs so she can keep tasting.

"JESUS! Oh...no. She isn't stopping."

"Nice?" Lois asks, shoving at Clarks nose. "He's actually friendlier than my husband ever was."

"Soft," Clark rumbles. "Strong. Smell good. Clever. Protect you. You protect me."

"Lois yours," Kara agrees.

Kara tastes and tastes and Siobahn is salty and good.

"Want you to live forever," Kara rumbles. 

She licks Siobahn's throat. Salty and hot. The blood inside smells perfect.

"The guide from the Naltorian tribe told a story about this," Lois says. Maybe to Siobahn. "They say that whoever the wolves choose never tires. Can't be injured. Never dies."

Siobahn shivers.

"Living forever beats spreading my legs for ten-pence, I suppose."

"Bite? Make mine?"

Siobahn pulls Kara's muzzle close and presses her lips to her nose.

"You are strange. Yes. Bite."

* * *


	3. Empty Bellies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara and Lena have the same feelings and they don't know it.

**Lena Luthor - Atlantic Passage**

Lena has learned that get old not so much for their power but because they have space. Because neighbors forget both their neighbors and the tragic deaths among them so easily. Becuse in the next town on the road she might as well be newborn with a different face, boy and voice.

The world is shrinking now. Becoming woven into a single cloth a way it hasn't since Alexander rode across it and this time, it is likely to stay that way for for good. Talk of steamships that will cross the Atlantic in a week, not half a season. Rifled bullets that spin as they fly and strike accurately. 

Constables who sketch faces. Printing presses that can put a murderer's face on every lamppost in London overnight.

Most inconvenient.

There will come a time when Lena is known in every city she visits and hunted if she is not too fearsome to challenge, sooner or she will be destroyed. A particularly tasty maiden or satisfying maiming that soothes her too much. Sleeping in her coffin but forgetting the lock on the door.

A moment of weakness is all it takes.

The path to sorceress-hood is painful and wicked. The sacrifice needed to transcend all weakness must be equally dear, like pulling ones skin from one's bones. Ripping away something dear to the humanity -- former humanity -- of one seeking the power. Countessa Bellini warned her of that.

What frightens her is how it digusts her less and less.

Her body heals the blows with ease. This is a prisoner ship taking exiles to hard labor in the Yukon stacked with the sort who will be thrown overboard should they take sick in the passage.

When he sees her at the inn with her first love's bones in her lips, driving the dancing couples around with a sharp, nerve-scraping reel, she nearly loses Jack. Jess stops speaking to her without explanation. They share meals, both blood and mundane, in sullen, hollow silence. 

Lena took up the songbook when they sailed from Ireland. Songs of faeries and demons played on death-forged instruments.

She is in the middle of something titled _Rend_ in an abyssal tongue when Jess knocks on the rim of cabin door.

Having learned the consequence of putting down the fiddle -- and having blown the middle mast clear of the ship in a column of jet-black lightning -- Lena only lifts a brow to acknowledge her. Task completed and blood gathered in the grooves of the fiddle, she sets it in its velvet nest and dabs her wounds with the rag.

"Jess?" she asks, afraid of the reply and lack of any reply equally.

"I should apologize. You'd been hinting you needed _more_ than you had to help us survive and for a vampire whose mother taught her to chip flint arrows, there's nothing else that's _more_ to be had."

Lena nods.

"I don't understand why you're in such a hurry to do this but I understand it's for my own good. Jack will, once we find him a nice boy with big hands who smells of good whisky and bad choices."

The silence returns. It's a bit warmer than before.

"Xi is missing your taste," Jess jokes. "Like blood-damp silk, she says."

Lena sighs.

"There's a reason I haven't sired since you, Jess."

"You are still lonely. Meals are not _delicacies_ and bedwarmers are not _lovers_."

"Precisely."

"What did you think about when you played that? It was beautiful."

"Some great beast, I suppose. Punishing me. Bringing me to heel. Like the tale Norse have. What is it...ah, yes! Fenris. The dread wolf that chases the moon across the sky until the world ends and the beast finally catches it."

"Well, if Fenris comes by, give her a scratch behind the ears for me."

Jess chuckles and goes to close the door. The silk robe she wears -- naturally, taken from her playmate -- whispers behind her.

* * *

**Siobahn - Yukon**

**  
** Jealousy isn't a particularly useful feeling for whores. Utterly without purpose. Better pay in joining another in the work than chasing them off and less likely to earn a gift of arsenic in the whisky.

She shouldn't be jealous of the pups as they topple Kara and sniff and paw her all over like a river of fur washing past.

She definitely shouldn't be jealous of Lois slowly picking through a grammar school dictionary with Kara and Clark hanging on every lesson.

That will end in Clark making her sleep in the rain in human form until she apologizes.

She shouldn't _hate_ the fact that Kara, the alpha, the queen, pushed her into furs and mounted her, pinning her like a boulder that would crush her if she moved in the slightest. Where that golden-haired woman produced that cock from she's never going to understand but she wielded it like a soldier wields a spear and her teeth spanned the back of the neck and she huffed and snarled and _held_ and Siobahn didn't want to move in the first place, not with fire spreading in her blood, that same hot, slowly-winding _fire_ in her belly like from the back of the carriage.

She didn't want to move and also knew she couldn't move. Wasn't allowed. She was to lay there and get fucked -- hardly new territory -- but it wasn't for a few coins. She was being given a place. It was all the tastier for it. Teeth plunged into her neck and her body bent like a snapping twig and she tasted iron and fire and raw meat and Siobahn thinks she went to hell and slapped the devil, laughing all the while. Might have happened.

They were stuck a long time with a Kara slid out of her along with what felt like a bucket of their combined mess and that long, thick, hot, _teeth-shaking_ and _gut-stuffing_ wonder of a cock and the heavy, firm balls to go with it pulled up into her womb or into the night sky or where fucking ever inside Kara's tanned, muscled body.

"The alpha has fed. The pack welcomes you. Make a place to sleep. If you wish to share warmth, ask and they may ask of you in turn. All food is in common, so long as order is observed in who eats first."

Kara showed her something a thousand customers never did, then lifted off and skulked away like a kicked puppy. As if scourging Siobahn's guts of every man who'd ever been inside her and replacing them with something new and curious and marvelous that she wanted every day of her life had been saying a Hail Mary in Church. Washing the hands. Paying the landlady.

A mystery for Siobahn and an errand for Kara.

Ten. Fucking. Days.

_If I don't get a knot in me, I will go insane._

By the time she realizes she said it aloud, twenty-three heads turn her way. The pups don't understand so they remain busy smearing Kara with love and deafening her with their happy yipping. 

Lois is unbitten still but treated as the fucking Queen of Sheba, plied for trinkets and tales of actual civilization in Chicago and San Francisco and Manhattan. The pack decided it will be done under a full moon, as alpha matings are but perhaps not this one. Not until Lois has secured enough supplies from human run-shops or until someone else has mastered English well enough to make the trades. 

Clark has shifted to his wolf form only to hunt and the man needs to either _share_ or find some _goddamned trousers_ or Siobahn is considering making a play, beta or not.

On hearing her outburst, Lois gives her a small smile. It isn't as if Lois isn't well aware she is receiving what Siobahn has been denied.

The beta who had been a prospector -- Joe -- gives her a perfectly pleasant fuck and kisses her all afternoon before calling Ginny, his mate over who proceeds to lick the sweat off every inch of Siobahn before nuzzling in to sleep. Whores charge extra for kissing. Now, she feels she has robbed _herself_ for years by never indulging. Joe brings that crackling shiver inside her skull, like Kara had. Only one, and far less blinding. In the same way a brief drizzle and a ship-snapping, city-flattening hurricane are both _rain._

* * *

**Sam Arias - Yukon Territories**

Maxwell Lord is a preacher. He lectures people and they pay him for it. He locks his wife away every night, comes down to the fireside and calls Sam from the skull he has her bound in.

Her male form is easy enough. Like a too-large coat. Shoving a phantasmal cock up this man's ass -- if she makes the disguise fromflesh, she worries she might hurt herself on the stick already up there -- amuses her. 

Making a lie of his every word on the pulpit could amuse her forever.

If her masters weren't so impatient.

_Scourge._

_Sicken._

_Shred._

_You were made to Reign!_

There are a few humans she tolerates. The nunnery down the road buy her pies. They keep trying to snatch her daughter for a Christian education. Ruby is a gift from her last summoner, a decidedly nicer man who wanted not to die a virgin and nothing more complex than that. They share their good coffee and let her borrow books for Ruby. Sam hasn't ripped their guts out through their cunts. 

That will change if this new talk of 'fallen women' gathers steam. Sam surely can't be left to care for a child she has grown, weaned, and cared for since she was nothing but cold seed settling in her infernal womb. She would't know how is the thinking.

If Ruby is to be taken from her, then the Nine Princes will get their wish. The end will come.

She's watched Lord carefully. He is running out of good salt. Perhaps he thinks _any_ salt will do for the binding circle. The words he binds Ruby with have weakened -- only Sam knows her true name _\--_ but if the skull is smashed, her daughter will be tutored in hell. Canada remands preferable.

\-----

Tonight, his wife demanded her share.

Tonight, he is drunk.

Tonight, he scuffs the salt circle with his issue, wetting and ruining it.

His life for the location of the tooth stolen from the skull, the key to her chains.

Sam doesn't bother with killing him. Let him be found fucked up the ass until he can't walk by the church ladies.

She calls her old hellhounds to her side and teaches Ruby how to ride her favorite.

There's magic to the northwest, in the rocky hills. Wild and pure and raw. There's magic to the east, snaking slowly down the river. Well refined, bottomless and wicked. Unless she misses her guess, a wild god and a sorceress are drawing ever closer to each other.

Sam wants to see what happens when they meet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lena is a Morgana/Lucy Westerna convergence. Because of Katie McGrath.  
> \-----  
> Vampires both gain power and simply _toughness_ as they age. A vampire who's lived as long as two human lives might be able to take a wound that would dust a newborn.
> 
> Lena predates the Cooper Age (5000 BC), meaning she is at minimum 7,000 years old.


End file.
